On This Day in 1997: SummerSlam 1997 sees Michaels plant the seeds for the Montreal Screwjob

The 1997 SummerSlam at the FleetCenter in Boston was supposed to be Bret Hart’s coronation—him retaking the WWF Championship from The Undertaker in a match that had been built as the natural culmination of a year’s worth of storytelling. Instead, it became the opening volley in a personal war that would consume the company’s main event scene for the next four months. Shawn Michaels, inserted into the main event equation as special referee, didn’t just call the match; he inserted himself into it, superkicking Hart out of the ring in the closing moments and costing him the title. The crowd didn’t know whether to boo or cheer—they were watching a working shoot unfold in real time, the kind of blurred line between performance and office politics that defined the Attitude Era at its most electric.

What made this moment sting wasn’t the interference itself; it was the nakedness of it, the visible tension between two men who genuinely despised each other playing out on wrestling’s second-biggest stage. Hart had been the company’s linchpin for four years, the workhorse champion who’d carried the belt through the worst business period in WWE history. Michaels had ascended rapidly on athleticism and charisma, but his legitimacy was still being contested by the old guard. By August 1997, those tensions had calcified into a personal vendetta that Vince McMahon was now openly exploiting as storyline fuel. The SuperKick heard ’round the world didn’t just cost Hart the title; it positioned Michaels as the man who could reach into Hart’s most important moments and ruin them.

The irony—and the genius—is that this wasn’t some grand conspiracy hatched in the back. This was McMahon watching two of his biggest stars genuinely dislike each other and deciding to monetize the heat rather than extinguish it. Hart’s pursuit of Michaels would define the fall of 1997, culminating in Montreal, where the line between worked angle and legitimate screwjob would become impossible to untangle. Three decades later, wrestling still hasn’t fully grappled with what that moment represented: the moment when the business became openly interested in making money off its own dysfunction rather than in spite of it.